Contents

April 27, 2006 • Volume 53, Number 7

LETTERS

Contributors

Andrew O’Hagan was awarded the E.M. Forster Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His latest novel, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, is now out in paperback. (September 2011)

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the author of numerous books on American history, served as adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He died this year. His Journals: 1952– 2000, from which an excerpt appears in this issue, will be published in October by Penguin. (October 2007)

Julia Hartwig is one of the most admired poets in Poland today. (April 2006)

Colm Tóibín is the author of six novels, including The Master (a novel based on the life of Henry James) and Brooklyn, and two collections of stories, Mothers and Sons and The Empty Family. He has been a visiting writer at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton, and is now the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia.

William H. McNeill is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. His most recent books are The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir and Summers Long Ago: On Grandfather’s Farm and in Grandmother’s Kitchen, published by the Berkshire Publishing Group. His most recent publication, as editor, is the second edition of the Encyclopedia of World History.

Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His latest book is The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England. (December 2009)

Aryeh Neier, former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, is President of the Open Society Institute. His most recent book is Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights. (November 2007)

Leonard Benardo is Regional Director for Russia at the Open Society Institute. He is the coauthor (with Jennifer Weiss) of Brooklyn by Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Bridges, Parks, and More Got Their Names, to be published in July. (April 2006)

Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

Dai Qing, who normally lives in Beijing, has been a Research Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra, during 2007. She is the author, since the 1980s, of a number of major works that deal with the dark side of Chinese Communist Party history and China’s water crisis. Imprisoned in Beijing in 1989 and 1990, she has received international awards for advocating freedom of the press and for her work on China’s environmental problems. (December 2007)

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian of China. Until 1998 he was East Asia editor of The Times of London. (October 2011)

Bill McKibben is scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. He is also the founder of 350.org, the global climate campaign that has been actively involved in the fight against natural gas fracking.

Henry Siegman is President of the U.S./Middle East Project. He is a non-resident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, a former Senior Fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former National Director of the American Jewish Congress.

Christopher de Bellaigue was born in London in 1971 and has worked as a journalist in the Middle East and South Asia since 1994. His first book, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. He lives in Tehran with his wife and two children.

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic’s most recent works are Voice at 3 a.m., a selection of later and new poems; Master of Disguises, new poems; and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of short essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor, based in Rome, at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, she is the author of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome and The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. She has published a translation of Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture. Her latest books are a biography of Giordano Bruno and a translation of Bruno’s dialogue On the Heroic Frenzies.

John Gray is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. Among his most recent books are Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, and The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death.